Christians in Exile
Remembering Richard John Neuhaus and "American Babylon"
Thirty-five years ago this spring, the Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus founded the influential journal First Things. In September of the same year, Neuhaus professed his faith as a Roman Catholic. Father Neuhaus was an influential figure on the American religious and intellectual scene for five decades, and his approach to faith and culture remains compelling and instructive today.
Born in Ontario in 1936 to a Lutheran minister and his wife, Neuhaus moved to the United States in the 1950s, attended Concordia Lutheran College in Texas and Concordia Seminary in Missouri, and was ordained in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1960. He went on to notoriety as a civil rights activist, an ecumenism advocate, and an incisive analyst of political, sociological, cultural, and religious affairs in books—among them In Defense of People (1971); The Naked Public Square (1986); The Catholic Moment (1987); Doing Well and Doing Good (1992); and As I Lay Dying (2002)—and in journals, especially First Things, which he founded, edited, and contributed to until his death in 2009.
On that occasion, I wrote a blog post expressing my appreciation for Neuhaus’s impact on my own intellectual development. I had purchased a subscription (hard copy, at the time) to First Things during my time in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s and held on to it for many years thereafter. Surrounded by agnostic institutions and ideas, I found the content of First Things—not least Fr. Neuhaus’s own trenchant critique of American culture—to be an oasis of refreshment in a desert of secularism. The journal introduced me to an array of first-rate scholars who managed to integrate rigorous intellectual work and committed faith: Mary Ann Glendon, Robert P. George, Robert Louis Wilken, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Wilfred McClay, and many others.
Neuhaus narrowly escaped death from cancer in 2002, the impetus for his moving reflection, As I Lay Dying. He succumbed seven years later, and his final book was published the same year. Like so much of Neuhaus’s work, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, remains relevant and worthy of engagement.
In American Babylon, Neuhaus offered an extended reflection on the place of the Christian within American society. While he discussed specifically American concerns, Neuhaus applied broader Christian principles. He rightly noted that the question of how a Christian is to relate to secular American culture is but one particular instance of the perennial question concerning how Christians are to be “in but not of the world.” We all accept the words of Jesus “that we are to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” Neuhaus observed, “but there is continuing argument about what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God.” This is an ongoing argument, in part, because by its nature the problem is insoluble; there is no perfect, final relationship between church and state, between Christianity and culture, that will put to an end all tension and possibility of corruption. As Neuhaus wrote, “Over the centuries there has been conflation of church and state, coexistence of church and state, separation of church and state, and multiple other arrangements, none of them entirely satisfactory.”
Neuhaus made the counterintuitive but profoundly true point that a focus on the transcendent and a recognition of the transitory character of this world can actually make a Christian’s encounter with it more effective; that “other-worldly hope can intensify one’s engagement in the responsibilities of this world.” The Christian who maintains hope in a perfect world beyond this one, where all that is good will be fulfilled and all that is evil purged, has strong motivation to work for the good in the here and now. Contrary to Marx, then, religion is not the opiate of the masses, inuring them to the miseries imposed by capitalist oppressors, but the life-bread of the masses, giving them reason to persevere in virtuous labor even in the midst of want, knowing that their efforts are not wasted. A benevolent God will make all right in the end.
Understood properly, Neuhaus contended, “it is not a matter of ‘balancing’ the other-worldy against that this-worldly,” for “each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the promised future.” The “new heaven and the new earth” of Revelation, he continued, “does not abandon this heaven and this earth. Rather, they are taken up into transcendent fulfillment.” The Christian strives to do good and avoid evil in this world, even as he recognizes that this world is but a waystation on the journey to his final destination. As the Christian moves through this world, then, he does well to carry with him an “Augustinian sensibility”—“the sensibility of the pilgrim through time who resolutely resists the temptation to despair in the face of history’s disappointments and tragedies, and just as resolutely declines the delusion of having arrived at history’s end.” Even as St. Augustine assessed the history and character of the Roman Empire of his day through the lens of a Christian eschatology, so believers today must assess their own culture. “For those whose primary allegiance is to the City of God, every foreign country is a homeland and every homeland is a foreign country.” Yet, “like every political configuration of the earthly city, America, too, is Babylon,” a place of exile as we await return to our true home. “It is, for better and worse, the place of our pilgrimage through time toward home.”
“As Christians and as Americans,” Neuhaus reflected, “in this our awkward duality of citizenship, we seek to be faithful in a time not of our choosing but of our testing.” The “awkward duality of citizenship” was the theme that inspired my own dissertation and first book, American Catholic Intellectuals and the Dilemma of Dual Identities. For American Christians serious about being both American and Christian, there is no escaping the dilemma, because, again, the City of God and the City of Man are commingled in this world. Christians who are inclined to see no conflict between their faith and the culture in which they live need to be reminded, in Neuhaus’s words, to “worry about the ways in which accommodation to this foreign city can become betrayal. The temptation to worship false gods usually presents itself in subtle forms.” Conversely, Christians who are inclined to retreat radically from the culture and condemn it at a distance should recall that “America is our homeland” and “in its welfare is our welfare.”
“When I meet God,” Neuhaus wrote near the beginning of his last book, “I expect to meet him as an American. Not most importantly as an American, to be sure, but as someone who tried to take seriously . . . the story of America within the story of the world.” In the same year he published those words, Fr. Neuhaus did meet God—as an American, I suspect.
I still miss my monthly First Things rendezvous with Neuhaus’s learned and witty commentary, delivered with a happy-warrior attitude. He would have had interesting things to say about COVID-19, the rise of the religious “nones” in America, Pope Francis, and Donald Trump. But the wisdom he expressed in American Babylon remains a touchstone for reflection on these and other matters, because that wisdom is perennially true, standing in the tradition of Aquinas, Augustine, Paul, and Christ himself. Seek the welfare of the City of Man as a true citizen of the City of God. Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. This wisdom is distilled in the final passage of Neuhaus’s final book, which speaks of meeting the challenges of “our time and place.” It is, he writes,
a time for dancing, even if to the songs of Zion in a foreign land; a time for walking together, unintimidated when we seem to be a small and beleaguered band; a time for rejoicing in momentary triumphs, and for defiance in momentary defeats; a time for persistence in reasoned argument, never tiring in proposing to the world a more excellent way; a time for generosity toward those who would make us their enemy; and, finally, a time for happy surrender to brother death—but not before, through our laughter and tears, we see and hail from afar the New Jerusalem and know that it is all time toward home.